In recent years, catheter intervention for patients suffering from an ischemic heart disease such as myocardial infarct has been increasingly widespread. Typical catheter intervention includes percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty or intravascular stent placement. These treatments are less invasive and require a short stay in a hospital.
On the other hand, effectiveness of coronary artery bypass grafting (hereinafter referred to as CABG) has been widely recognized for patients who cannot undergo the catheter treatment. This method is intended for anastomosing one end of a bypass blood vessel such as an ablated internal thoracic artery or gastroepiploic artery to a peripheral side of a coronary artery with stenosis that may cause ischemia to eliminate the ischemia.
Patients who undergo the CABG often have a plurality of coronary arteries with obstruction or stenosis, a calcified ascending aorta, a chronic disease of brain, kidney, or a respiratory organ, and are elderly people, and thus the CABG may pose substantial risk to the patients. The highest risk to the patients is to stop the heart and use a heart-lung machine for extracorporeal circulation. Applying the heart-lung machine to patients with advanced arteriosclerosis is like supplying water to a rusty water pipe under high pressure. Thus, accretions in a blood vessel may be swept away to block another blood vessel, thereby causing a complication such as brain infarct and the like.
For such patients, an attempt has been made to anastomose a bypass graft without a heart-lung machine while the heart is beating, and satisfactory results have been achieved. This method is called off-pump coronary artery bypass (hereinafter abbreviated as OPCAB).
The problem of the OPCAB is that performing a complete anastomosis in a short time requires skills because the heart is beating. An imperfect anastomosis may cause a blood clot to form in a coronary artery or a bypass blood vessel from the anastomosis portion to cause obstruction. For this problem, a stabilizer is used to control movement of the anastomosis portion and allow the anastomosis of the bypass blood vessel in a stable manner, thereby increasing accuracy of the anastomosis and significantly increasing the results of the OPCAB (Patent Document 1).
Further, in order to increase accuracy of an anastomosis of an affected area that is difficult to anastomose because the area cannot be seen from the front in a normal state, a device is disclosed that is attached to and holds the heart to adjust the position of the heart (Patent Document 2). The device disclosed in Patent Document 2 includes one suction cup portion attachable to a heart wall surface, one arm for adjusting the position of the suction cup portion, and a suction tube that communicates with the suction cup portion and is connectable to a suction source. This device, however, adjusts the position of the heart by a force from one direction, which may cause displacement or fall of the heart during the anastomosis with the position of the heart being adjusted.
[Patent Document 1] U.S. Pat. No. 5,836,311
[Patent Document 2] International Publication No. 02/054937